Update: Storify auto-publish to WordPress was a giant FAIL. I’m doing a copy-paste from my original on Storify and I’ll probably not attempt syndicating from Storify again. If it worked, I’d have stuck with it since it makes the task of pulling from disparate social media streams effortless.

This is gonna be my first try at Storify, an effective and super-easy way to weave a cohesive story around different social media genres: blogs, tweets, flickr, youtube, etc.

As I’d said yesterday, this is a great way for me to share the social media moments on stuff that I work on, given how most of those involve articles, blog posts, tweets, etc.

This is of course, an experiment, since I’m not sure how well the auto-publish from Storify to WordPress works. I’ve also noticed that the drafting process on Storify is broken since it doesn’t auto-save well and you’re likely to lose portions of content if you choose not to publish it rightaway.

But, I digress… On to today’s launch: LinkedIn’s Android App.

The (Professional) Droid has landed…

Chad Whitney, my colleague at LinkedIn blogged about the launch of the LinkedIn’s Android app earlier today. This is the 2nd consecutive product launch from the House of Adam Nash, who blogged yesterday about the launch of our development platform.

Chad’s great at coming up with short, succinct posts that really get to the point and also gives the reader exactly what they’re looking for in terms of links, downloads, etc., without them having to read through reams of text.

So, here’s his post that announced the availability earlier this morning on the LinkedIn Blog.

Blog highlights: So you don’t have to read through them all…

As I’d mentioned earlier, one of the perks of my job is sharing this news with the rest of the world. Here are reactions from key tech blogs:

LinkedIn for Android v1.0 is the complete experience, though. There has been incredible demand for a LinkedIn Android application for some time. And while it took the company a little too long to get this app to the Android Marketplace, the bottom line is that LinkedIn is now on the major smartphone platforms (iPhone, BlackBerry and Android), making it easy for its more than 100 million users to access the network on the go.

The app allows users to access the profiles of your connections, and you can send connections a message directly from the application. Messaging has been fully integrated in the app in the new version, and you can now send and receive messages from the app. Additionally, you can accept outstanding network invitations.

While I don’t imagine I will be looking for connection suggestions on my phone, the ability to quickly look up user profiles before a meeting sounds like a great feature. Have a meeting and don’t know much about the person you’re meeting with? Check out LinkedIn and you can get a full background.

The LinkedIn team have been busy. Following the launch of its Developer Platform, enabling users to embed sharing buttons and plugins, LinkedIn has announced the availability of its official Android application, launching today on the Android Market.

Of course, there were other mobile blogs that also that picked up on the above posts or did their own analysis of the app. Check them out from the related Techmeme thread here.

User reactions: From finally to oh yae…

And, finally, I thought it’d be great to pull some of the key reactions.

I find that Storify makes it super-easy to pull in relevant tweets. Tip: favorite the tweets you want to pull into your story and then find them on your twitter tab within storify. Again, super-easy and auto-formatted. I realize I can alternatively, just embed the tweets in WordPress like below.

SHARE WITH FRIENDS:

I’m sure Adam would have rather used this as the title for his LinkedIn blog post, something we debated yesterday evening as he finalized his post. Jus kidding. Check out Adam’s more recent blog post on his personal blog, where he talks about the easter egg from today’s launch.

One of the areas I find interesting is the ability for publishers or bloggers to use LinkedIn plugins to make it even easier to engage with their readers. This could be either commenting on the blog post while some journalists may prefer the simpler member profile hovercard (something Flo helped us implement for the LinkedIn blog), which allows the reader to send a message to the post author, if they’re connected, and also shows your common connections.

Pretty slick!

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. What else can users create? For starters, there have been some pretty nifty implementations in the past, given a much smaller dev toolset. I can’t imagine what companies, small businesses and publishers are now gonna build with the tools given to them today.

I’ll just leave you with a quote from Jack Dorsey on the magic unleashed by developers on any platform:

You can’t build an electricity grid and say, “You should go out and invent vacuum cleaners. Or keyboards or toaster overs.” You have to give the right tools and primitives to folks, so they can build what they want, and what they want to see in the world.

With today’s launch, developers have been given the right tools to build upon LinkedIn’s powerful professional platform, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with. Expect to see my favorite examples covered on my blog here.

What others are saying…

One of the perks of my job is the opportunity to share some of this interesting news to users as well as to folks who are most interested in this stuff.

The idea behind plugins is to give developers are more lightweight way to embed LinkedIn functionality and data on third-party sites. ALl of the plugins can be integrated onto websites with just a few lines of javascript and are customizable, says Adam Nash. For example, LinkedIn’s Member Profile plugins brings a snippet of user profiles to a third-party site and can show users who they know within an application in a professional context.

The new LinkedIn Developer Platform and website make these APIs available to anyone who wants to use them. LinkedIn also opens its new platform for plug-ins, including the “Sign in with LinkedIn” button and the LinkedIn Share buttons you see on Mashable’s business and marketing stories. There are also plug-ins for member profiles, company profiles and a Recommend button that lets users recommend your products through their LinkedIn network.

The platform, though, isn’t just for developers. LinkedIn is offering an entire suite of plugins to bring all of this content to your website. Even better, it’s making it as easy as the click of a button and it could offer some serious competition to Facebook’s Open Graph on sites that cater to the career-minded.

But Facebook still seems to be a social playground for many users — a place they post photos and play games and share links to funny videos — while LinkedIn is like the office: it’s where users post their professional histories and connect with others in their field, search for jobs, and do other business-related things. So is there room for both to have a web-embracing plugin platform? Could LinkedIn appeal to older, more professional users who think Facebook is either too frivolous or too insecure and therefore don’t login or use its plugins?

LinkedIn will fill a crucial gap among credible OAuth providers — I’m always loathe to use my Facebook account to log into business-oriented apps and I imagine there are plenty of others out there who’d much rather log in with LinkedIn in those cases.

I could go on, but you get the picture. If you still want more, check out Techmeme for related stories.

So, once again: Kudos to Adam Nash and LinkedIn’s Platform team. And, here’s to the thousands of developers waiting to build these utilitarian apps for you.